The speaker Miss Sonia Plaza, Senior Economist in the Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice of the World Bank was one of the key panelists who added to the discussions on why data is important in the context of smaller nations within the global south and the challenges that exist in terms of creating data on migration processes. She spoke during the virtual panel discussion held on GCM Objective 1 focused on collection and utilization of accurate and disaggregated data as a basis for evidence-based policies. This was hosted by Global Research Forum on Diaspora and Transnationalism [GRFDT], Migrant Forum in Asia, Cross-Regional Centre for Refugees and Migrants and Civil Society Action Committee on 1st September 2020.
Current scenario of migration data
The focus on data of migration has definitely received more attention since the onset of the Global Compact For Migration came about in 2018, although initiatives were taken earlier through various other channels such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and The Global Migration Group to address the issue of transparency and accuracy of migration data and efforts were made to produce handbooks to generate information on migration and cooperation respectively. Despite of these multiple effort to bring out the importance of data in the global migration process, there were still prevalence of undocumented migrants such the transit migrants and return migrants.
Challenges on collection of migration data
The regulators for the data collection and its assembly for the purpose of accessibility are the Governments, Non-Profit organizations and the Intergovernmental organizations such as the IOM, UNICEF and The World Bank. The responsibility for the data collection on migration at a national level lies in the hands of the state, which usually faces the issues of funding in terms of the implementation of the Census. For instance, “The United States of America has implemented the Census 2020 and the fund it required was 1 Million USD. This range of funds seems to be quite an impossibility for countries in the developing regions for Africa such as Somalia,” as stated by Plaza. The other possible challenges could be how the availability of funds in a country gets masked due to the prevailing corruption, which further becomes a hindrance in the functioning of the National Strategic office to work closely on migration data.
Talking of the ongoing global pandemic of COVID-19, this has played the role of a major barrier in the documentation of the migrants and producing data. There has been an increase in the recruitment costs for the migrant workers to move to the country of destination from that of the origin and have created the most marginalized types of migrants such as the transit and return migrants since the onset of the pandemic.
Pragmatic measures towards collection of accurate data
One of the most appropriate mechanisms that could be adopted to work on the data on migration and maintain the most updated versions of the same is through the involvement of the National Strategic Office at the national level as stated by Sonia Plaza. Social networking platforms could also be utilized by countries with lower GDP to derive data on migration, which until today has only been possible in regard to the internal migration but could be extended to the international migration. Lastly, working on the south-south corridors in regard to SDGs are also a crucial apparatus of deriving more data out of the migration process in the underdeveloped and developing regions of the world .
Pooja Priya , is a postgraduate in sociology from Delhi school of economics, University of Delhi. She holds research interests in: migration within the global south, marginalization for ethnically minority groups, racialization in India. Twitter id :poojapr92856063